by James Axler
She shook her head helplessly. Who knew it would be this complicated, hunting for her sister’s killers?
Because the outlander coldhearts only ever came to Conn’s gaudy house, or rarely to Sinkhole proper by way of it, she reckoned their hideout had to lie somewhere to the west. So they’d started out following the Mother Road, which paralleled Stenson’s Creek away from Sinkhole, to begin her search.
After about six or eight miles, though, the wooded hills gave way to flatter karst country, more given to grass and patches of scrub than pine or hardwood forests. Dorden had suggested it was unlikely the outlanders laired up in such open country, despite the occasional harsh limestone ridge. She’d agreed.
“We’re what,” she said, “mebbe a mile south of the road by now?”
They were following a game trail. It was the best thing she could think of, and not even know-it-all old Dorden had come up with better.
“That’s right,” Mance said.
“And nobody we came across has seen hide nor hair of them,” Lou Eddars said. He was Mance’s friend and their chief tracker. His freckled face streamed with sweat, though nothing it seemed could keep down his frizz of orange curly hair. He had ears that stuck out, big buck teeth and an Adam’s apple that looked like a baseball lodged in his throat. But he was an accomplished hunter who knew the countryside around Sinkhole as well as any.
As well as anybody who’d chosen to throw in with Wymie and her quest, anyway.
“What about the signs of recent campsites,” Mance asked his pal, “like that one we come across the last ridge back? Fire ashes were still warm, even.”
Lou shook his head. “Too small,” he said. “Looks like folks who camped there heard us coming, or spotted us, and lit out for the brush. We got too many weps showin’ to look triple peaceful-like, which is also why we can’t raise too many local folk to ask if they seen the outlanders.”
Wymie sighed.
“Let’s follow this trail a spell farther,” she said.
“If at first you don’t succeed,” Vin said with a cackle, “try, try again.”
It also surprised Wymie the oldie had stuck right with her throughout all the exertion and frustration. But thinking about it, she realized it shouldn’t. He might look as if he could scarcely totter across a room, especially with the limp he’d had for decades, but he still spent much of his days tramping around the hills around Sinkhole. He lived for excitement, such as was to be had for a man of his great age in a peaceful, quiet backwater like the Pennyrile. She had no idea whether he actually shared her conviction as to the outlanders’ guilt or not, but it made no difference, she guessed, as long as he—and his giant Peacemaker handblaster, with which he was still a dead shot—stayed by her side.
“But, Wymie,” Burny whined. “There’s a hundred square miles of these wooded hills around Sinkhole, and miles and miles more of these pissant deer trails crisscrossed all over ’em. Got to be. We could follow them until we all grow long gray beards and only find a sign of the coldhearts by sheer strike accident.”
Fury blazed within her. “Are you doubtin’ me?” she flared at him. “You lookin’ to bail on me too?”
Old Vin tittered. “Oh, ye of little faith,” he said.
Burny’s eyes widened and he took a step back.
“No, no,” he stammered. “All I’s sayin’ is, we need a better plan, seems to me.”
“And backin’ out on me’s a better one?” she shouted. “Is that your plan? Turn tail and run, like your buddy Walter John?”
“But, Wymie, he had to. He got an ailin’ wife and two kids to take care of. You know that.”
“Listen to me, Burny Stoops,” she said, dropping her voice low and menacing as she stepped up to him. Her anger had brought the others clustering close around. “I will keep after these outlanders, and I’ll find them. Once I do, folks’ll rally to me. You’ll see. And then there’ll be a day of reckonin’! And not just for them, but for them as sided with the child murderers by not helpin’ me! Which side will you be on, Burny Stoops?”
“Yeah!” Mance echoed. “Which side, Burny?”
“You with us or against us?” demanded Angus Chen, a carpenter from Sinkhole.
“With us or against us?” the others began to chant. They closed in threateningly on Burny.
He cowered. “No, Wymie, no!” he said. “It ain’t like that at all. But—people are startin’ to wonder if we’re ever gonna find them.”
“You wonderin’, you mean?” Wymie asked.
“No. I just heard— Oh, shit hell, Wymie. I’m with you. Please. You got to believe me.”
She looked in his brown eyes and saw only fear. And submission. After leaving him to wiggle in the spike of her gaze for half a minute she nodded.
“All right,” she said, turning away. “That’s better. Anybody else goin’ weak in the knees on me?”
She knew at least half her remaining people had spent the morning grumbling about a wild-goose chase, but now they stumbled all over one another and themselves to assure her they were in all the way.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s keep on this trail over the next rise. Then—we’ll see.
“All we need’s just a trail, even, that we’re sure leads to those stoneheart bastards. And then we’ll go back to town and see who’s really with us, and who’s with the outland baby-killers.”
“Mathus Conn might not take kindly to that, Wymie,” Dorden said, “without more evidence the outlanders are the ones who did it.”
“Then coamers can eat Mathus Conn’s guts!” she cried, invoking the terrible half-remembered childhood legend that for some reason sprang into her mind.
“The worms go in,” Vin sang. “The worms go out…”
“Oh, put a sock in it, you wrinkled old loon!”
* * *
“FIREBLAST!” RYAN YELLED.
And indeed that happened, straight for his face from the muzzle of Abe’s blaster.
Ryan felt the heat of the yellow black-powder flame-flare from their host’s blaster like a dragon’s breath on his face. Its glare dazzled his good eye, and he felt hot powder specks pepper his cheek right below the socket.
He wasn’t aware of hearing its roaring report nor the sound of his own 9 mm SIG Sauer blasting.
An agonized scream from right behind him ripped even through the ringing in his ears.
At the same moment he saw a pale shape, indistinct among the scrub that rimmed the boulder-lined bowl, rear up behind Abe, throw hands in the air at the ends of long but manlike arms and topple backward. Though vague blue blobs floated in his monocular vision, he had gotten the impression of a third, red eye opening above the two he had glimpsed glaring at him from the brush just behind and above their host.
Krysty was on her feet, aiming her Glock handblaster at Abe with both hands. A side-glance showed her face to have gone bone-white.
“Back off the trigger!” Ryan barked. “Everybody, blasters out and eyes outward, now!”
He scrambled to his feet, his SIG held out before him. Their host continued to kneel, his Ruger’s blue-smoking barrel tipped toward low, scattered clouds, finger off the trigger and thumb on the hammer.
Everybody else jumped up. When Ryan Cawdor told them to do something in that tone of voice, they did it, even when they didn’t have an apparent face-up gunfight to galvanize them.
“Muties!” Ricky yelped. He was hauling his big double-action top-break Webley revolver from its holster as he scrambled to his feet, coming perilously close to toppling into the fire as he did so. He cursed as he bumped the roasting-spit branches, toppling the grouse into the flames in an upward rain of orange sparks, already bright in the fading afternoon.
When Ryan saw their host turn around—without bothering to get up—to cover the way Ryan was looking, he followed his own order and whipped around. No targets presented themselves. He saw a thrashing in the brush about where he reckoned the old woodsman had fired. As he watched, it seemed to diminish.
>
Krysty’s Glock snarled out a burst at full auto. Leaves and branch and bark fragments flew up from the scrub oak.
“Hold fire!” Ryan snapped. “Don’t shoot unless you got a sure target!”
“What if they start throwing rocks?” he heard Ricky say from behind him.
J.B.’s dry chuckle followed. “Then you got a target, son,” the Armorer said, “even if it’s only to discourage that behavior.”
They stood there with blasters pointed outward from the fire, straining their eyes into the screen of leafy branches surrounding the little dip in the boulder-outcrop’s top. But as soon as the limb-thrashing died away completely, they saw nothing more.
“The sun is setting,” Doc said. He had his rapier in his right hand, and his gigantic LeMat handblaster in the left. “Is that not when Mr. Tomoyama says they begin to attack in earnest?”
“It was,” Abe answered. “And no ‘mister’ stuff, please. Makes me sound like my daddy.”
“Why do they even do that?” Mildred asked. “They’ve thrown crap at us while the sun was shining. Why not kill then, too?”
“Are you seriously asking any of us what does or does not motivate a bunch of blood-crazed cannie killers, Mildred?” Ryan asked, gently, he thought, under the circumstances.
“Um—no. I guess I’m not.”
“Ace,” Ryan said. “While we’re asking questions we’ll never know the rad-blasted answers to, why in the name of glowing night shit do they bother hassling us by chucking trash at us? If they mean to chill, why don’t they just come at us?”
“Our situation must be precarious indeed,” Doc said, “if our taciturn leader finds himself reduced to asking rhetorical questions.”
“Mebbe not that rhetorical, Doc,” J.B. said. “If we know more about why they do what they do, that might give us a leg up on reckoning what they’re going to do.”
Abe made a rumbling sound low in this throat. “I must be getting senile,” he said. “Shoulda put out some telltales before we sat down to palaver.”
“‘Telltales’?” Ricky and Mildred echoed.
“Means alarms, I reckon,” J.B. said. “Little something to let him know when something—or somebody—is creepy-crawling around his camp.”
“That’s it exactly, Mr. Dix!”
“Abe, I’m not my daddy, either.”
The old woodsman laughed. “Ace on the line, J.B. Yeah, I set string lines of little bells and bits of jingly stuff like old bent-outta-shape nails and shards of glass along the brush around my site. Makes it harder for anythin’ or anyone to sneak up on me. It’s one of the reasons I managed to keep from starin’ up at the stars long before this.”
He sighed. “Best I go out and set that straight before it gets any darker. Y’all just sit tight, make yourselves to home. I won’t be a minute.”
“Look for chills?” Jak asked Ryan.
“You won’t find any, most likely,” Abe said.
But Ryan knew the young albino was furious—at himself for not detecting the attacks earlier and at Ryan for shackling him and his stealth skills and senses by making him join the others by the fire to hear Abe’s lecture, rather than letting him roam around them like a watchdog.
“Go,” Ryan said.
Abe frowned dubiously after Jak as the young man vanished into the scrub without so much as shaking a twig.
Krysty smiled. “Don’t worry, Abe,” she said. “He wouldn’t be likely to trip your alarm system even if he didn’t know you were putting it out.”
“One of those, eh?”
Mildred sniffed loudly. “I smell something burning.”
“¡Nuestra Señora!” Ricky yelped. “I knocked them into the fire, I’m afraid. Sorry, Mr.—Abe—for ruining your supper.”
“Pshaw.” The stocky mountain man bent and deftly fished the half-charred spits from the flames. He straightened, holding the two grouse aloft like miniature torches.
He blew out the flames that were feeding on the fat that oozed out of the birds.
“It’s just added flavor,” he said.
* * *
SOMETHING BRUSHED WYMIE’S right cheek.
At first she thought it was an early hawk moth, trying to get a jump on its kin sucking sweet, sweet nectar from night-blooming forest flowers. Then she heard a thump and a curse from behind her.
She spun. Angus Chen was looking outraged and rubbing his cheek as if he’d been stung.
“Somethin’ hit me!” he declared.
Something else blurred through Wymie’s peripheral vision. She turned to her left to see a stick with green leaves on it bounce off the short grass to the right of the track they’d been following through a patch of berry bushes.
“Movement up ahead,” called Lou Eddars, who was a bit out in front of the rest of Wymie and her party, scouting for signs of their quarry.
“What the nuke is— Shit! Somebody threw a rock at me,” Mance said from right behind Wymie. Several other voices cried out that they’d been hit too.
“Oh, my God, it’s the night chillers!” The voice was so shrilled and distorted from fear that Wymie couldn’t recognize it, and she had known every man in her search party since she was a little girl younger than poor Blinda had been.
“Dark dusted!” Mance cried. He was holding it together better, but only just. “They’re all around us!”
Blasterfire erupted from the entire raggedy column. The noise momentarily deafened Wymie. As if by magic, she found herself enveloped by a fog bank of swirling gray smoke. She crouched in her tracks, disoriented and unsure of what to do.
Yellow flashes stabbed through the sulfurous clouds of powder smoke. Concussions beat her eardrums like fists. She suddenly heard a ripple of blasterfire that, though quickly ended, made her think of what a machine gun had to sound like. She’d heard of them, but had never seen one herself, nor heard one fired.
The burst of shots ended in a scream, of what Wymie thought to be surprise and fear, like one of Widow Oakey’s cats whose tail she had stepped on hard, and mebbe not entirely by accident.
Most of the group’s firearms were single-shot, whether muzzle-loaders or breech. As quick as it had started, the storm of shooting died away.
Wymie’s ears were ringing. She was trembling. She wasn’t accustomed to blasterfire at all. Her father had a shotgun, which he used to hunt meat for the pot, but he hadn’t used it close by the house very often. And Mord had hocked it to buy booze from Conn’s gaudy.
This much fire and smoke and shattering noise, happening all around her, all at once the way it did, had come close to overwhelming her. Just for a moment. But she instantly hated herself for weakness, and made herself stand upright despite the quivering of her legs and the looseness of her knees. She threw back her shoulders and held her head high.
Through the ringing that filled her ears she heard a strange rhythmic sound. It took a moment for her to recognize it as laughter. An oldie’s cracked voice, cawing like a mirth-filled crow.
“Them as don’t know what they’re shootin’ at,” Vin declared, “might as well be pissin’ bullets away.”
That wasn’t one of his dark-dusted old saws, at least not one she recognized as such. But even when he wasn’t speaking in overused phrases, he managed to make it sound as if he was.
“Nuke you, you wrinkled old bastard,” shouted Mance, who was trying to stuff two hand-loaded shells of brown waxed paper on brass bases into his cracked-open double-barrel shotgun. “They was there, I tell you. I saw the bushes move.”
Wymie found her voice. “Who’s hurt?” she asked. “What was all that squallin’ I heard?”
“That was just Burny,” Dorden reported. “All the chambers in his Colt 1860 went off at once. Sprained his wrist and scared him somethin’ fierce.”
The dense, stinking smoke-clouds were beginning to thin, though the smell seemed to coat her sinuses and tongue in the heavy, humid afternoon air.
“Anybody else?”
“I—I’m bleedin’
,” Angus said, staring in horror at the blood gleaming red on the fingertips he held before his face.
“You got a cut on your cheek,” Mance said. “You’ll live, likely.”
“Anybody else?” Wymie asked.
A couple of the others reported they had had sticks or rocks bounced off them. Nobody else seemed to be bleeding, though, inside or out.
“Well, we must have chilled some of the coldhearts, with all that shootin’,” Wymie declared.
She stood with arms crossed waiting while Lou and several of the others, including Mance, roved the bushes around them in the deepening gloom. Every second that passed without reported result stoked the embers of her smoldering rage.
“Sorry, Wymie.” Mance emerged from a serviceberry brush to report apologetically and more than half-nervously. “Nothin’.”
“Not even any blood?”
“No blood.”
“Any tracks?”
Mance shook his head.
“I didn’t think there was any way all of us could miss,” he said.
“Might as well have just been shootin’ the breeze.” Vin cackled. “Can’t miss fast enough to catch up.”
“Anybody see the white-haired mutie?” Mance asked. He seemed eager to placate his increasingly furious cousin, and acted as if he hoped to be able to throw at least some kind of bone.
“Albino,” Dorden muttered under his breath.
“I did,” Lou sang out.
“Me too!” Edmun called.
“But you were tail-end Charlie, Edmun,” Dorden said. “Lou was walking point.”
“What are you trying to say?” Wymie shrieked. “Are you doubtin’? Are you?”
The middle-aged man shrugged. “Just sayin’ he’d have to be triple fast, is all.”
“They won this round,” Vin said. “Tomorrow is another day.”
For a moment Wymie almost felt calm. “That almost made sense,” she said.
“What were they doin, Wymie?” Dorden asked. “They weren’t rightly attackin’ us. Even after we started blastin’ ’em.”
“They were afraid to, once we started blastin’,” Mance declared heatedly.
